Old News
Monday, April 20, 2026 6:30 PM
Friends + Interlocutors,
There are current events articles written ten, fifteen or twenty years ago which could have been written last week. That is because the present madness has been a long time in the making. The ground work was carefully prepared over many years. The private agenda war on Iran is a case in point.
I wrote in 2010, “The Fake Crisis” during the administration of Barack Obama. Despite my criticism of Obama’s targeted assassination campaign all over the Middle East via drone warfare, he and Secretary of State John Kerry stumbled into the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. This momentarily took the Iran bogyman off the skyline. For Obama, it was an unusual example of wandering off the reservation.
The JCPOA was such an oversized monkey-wrench in the Neocon/Israel Lobby private agenda for the Middle East that it just had to be destroyed. And sure enough it was, by Donald Trump, in his first term under the all-purpose cover of his so-called “America First” policy.
I do not recall Obama or any important Democrat or European leader uttering a word in support of Obama’s most important foreign policy achievement when Trump quashed it. Remember, the Europeans had co-signed it.
In fact, when the Democrats took back the White House with Joe Biden, he did nothing to reinstate the agreement, only making new, unreasonable demands on Iran. If the Washington foreign policy establishment had prevailed upon Biden to reinstate the agreement, no doubt there would be no Iran war today.
Patrick
=====